Developer Update for the Week of June 1, 2025: Post OTA Edition (20+ Questions)!

Welcome back to this week’s Developer Update! This week’s edition comes after:

• The launch of the new Series 5 card Xorn. If you don’t know if Xorn is worth getting, make sure to check out our Bonus Challenge guide for a post-release review of the card and new decklists!
• The latest OTA! If you haven’t seen what was changed with the balance update, be sure to check out the official patch notes!
• Announcement of the Marvel Snap June 2025 Season – Masters of the Arcane!

Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This week’s topics will be divided into Card Specific Questions, Other Questions, and Questions From You!

Card Specific Questions

Q: Most 6-Cost cards have some sort of hook that tie them into an archetype, but Hulkling doesn’t seem to have one. Does that contribute to his failure to find a deck, or is there a hook we are missing?
A: Glenn “I think it’s fair to say that every card needs a ‘hook’ in the sense that it needs one or more clear points of appeal for its audience. However, those points are not required to be competitively relevant, or even gameplay-relevant. Hulkling exists to satisfy players looking for variation among their big exciting cards—adding tension from game to game about what he might be able to do. I don’t think Hulkling failed; he just has a smaller audience than some other cards, but that’s ok because a core promise of CCGs is that they satisfy a wide range of players’ interests.”

Q: Does Wave create any design constraints when designing high Cost cards?
A: Glenn “Not really. It’s more challenging to ensure those cards are fun enough to play with than it is to avoid Wave making them too strong.”

Q: What exactly changed with Legions interaction with Storm’s flooded location? It feels like nothing changed.
A: Griffin “The change is that if you Legion the turn after Storm, only the current ‘Flooding’ location closes next turn. The new locations created by Legion stay as ‘Flooding’ for the next turn.

The ‘perfect curve’ of Storm -> War Machine -> Legion still works as before and is intended.”

Q: Did you consider nerfing the bonus that Cap's Shield gives Sam instead of dropping the Shield’s Power? The change just makes Red Guardian almost always target the Shield now.
A: Glenn “It was already so effective at this role that the improvement is fairly minor, and more interesting than worrying.

We always make wide considerations in balance updates—for example, we preferred this change and to keep the +2 rather than just nerf to +1 because it better supports the decks leveraging the bonus than decks like Strange Supreme Thanos.”

Q: If Sauron can be 1/3 and a card that enables a whole archetype consistently, why can’t echo have more power? She is inconsistent and costs a deck slot to run.
A: Glenn “Echo only costs one deck slot; Sauron costs several. I agree Echo is a little weak, and we’re considering a couple ways to adjust that, but this particular comparison doesn’t line up.”

Q: How is Mister Negative decks looking with such a spike in their playrate? Is Negative up for a nerf?
A: Glenn “It’s the best glass cannon deck, but it has a negative winrate and tends to reveal whether or not you should retreat on turn 3 or 4. That means it doesn’t gain cubes very efficiently. It’s weaker than a lot of other decks on the metrics, and Enchantress is another powerful card you can consider.”

Q: The new season video doesn’t mention any new Series 4 cards added at the start, and doesn’t show any new cards for the new game mode. Can we get any info on this?
A: Griffin “TWO new Series 4 cards will arrive on June 3 with the launch of the new season: Jennifer Kale and Nicholas Scratch!

We’ll be sharing more about the specific rewards for HV:Overdrive as the event draws closer.”

Q: The season preview showed new Skills, but they didn’t say “Banish This” in their text. Is the Banish format changing?
A: Griffn “Keen eye! Patch note preview:

Now that players have gotten a chance to get used to looking at card text tooltips and the skill card frame with Agamotto’s Ancient Arcana, we’re removing the “(Banish this.)” text from the skills. This isn’t a functional change; they’ll work the same way they’ve been working. The wording was somewhat misleading since this is a property of the skill card type, not an effect on the card, and so confused players in combination with cards like Iron Lad.”

Other Questions

Q: Was it intentional that you swapped the gold and token rewards for the weekend missions?
A: Griffin “Our plans are to change it back to the way it was previously at the end of the month.”

Q: With the global bounty over, do you think it was a successful event? Do you plan on making changes to future bounties?
A: Griffin “These Global Bounty events are intended to be something fun and simple to slot in when we don’t have other Limited Time Game Modes. They’re designed to require little-to-no dev time to set up so our team can keep focused on what they’re working on.

It’s hard to compare this one to the first in January as it was during the US outage ‘blip’. The prime metric of success I’m looking for is player enjoyment/sentiment. If players don’t like it, we won’t do it again. In fact, hopefully, we’ll never have to do it again because we’ll have LTGMs running more often going forward.”

Q: The patch/ OTA schedule noted you are pushing the next OTA up a week early to work on “the back end”. What exactly does that mean?
A: Griffin “It just means we’re working on some stuff behind the scenes so we didn’t want the OTA to be potentially affected.”

Q: Does how close or far the next OTA is affect balance decisions?
A: Glenn “Yeah, we take that sort of thing into account. For example, this week’s aims to have a more significant impact, given the downtime.

That’s not to say there’s any hard and fast rule–kind of the opposite, actually. We look at each OTA given the context surrounding that particular update, and decide what would be best for this specific point in time.”

Q: How does the next OTA look with only a week in between the last one?
A: Glenn “It means we’ll likely have a smaller OTA more focused on some buffs, since we’ll only have today and tomorrow to inform our decisions on nerfs.”

Q: As Snap ages, it seems like more and more decks are less synergy focused and more “insert good cards into every deck”. Is this a common trend for card games eventually, or are there any plans to steer the game away from this trend?
A: Glenn “This is a fairly common dynamic in card games. As the floor of strength rises over time, the best decks tend to be the ones capable of playing with the strongest cards while exposing the least vulnerability to other strong cards. That tends to polarize into decks with overwhelming strategies (Mister Negative) or decks that can play the most powerful interaction (Thanos Tech).

We’re still very early, this process tends to slow a bit as it goes, and we do frequent balance updates, so there’s nothing concerning yet. But we’re cognizant that as time passes, we’ll need to evaluate how we manage the dynamic. Notably, many CCGs pursue ‘rotation’ as the solve here, but we’re focusing our exploration on different solutions since that ground is so well-tread.”

Q: To clear up confusion, will new Spotlight releases be set to 2,400 at first release, but will be available at a later time for Tokens instead?
A: Griffin “That is the plan, yes.”

Q: Is there a specific rank that the evaluation for a change to a card starts? Or do you take all ranks into account?
A: Glenn “We slice the data in multiple ways to see it at different angles, but the one we weigh heaviest is Series 3 complete players in the top ~60% of our MMR (aka true skill) in ladder. This is because we want to measure players who have a high degree of agency in what they play, and how well those cards and decks perform overall. We don’t weigh rank itself much at all, because it’s tied more strongly to participation than anything else, in contrast to MMR.”

Q: Are there any plans of making a spectator mode, especially with official tournaments on the rise?
A: Glenn “We don’t have any plans for that in the short-term but we’re definitely aware of the feedback that it’d be great to have. I’ll continue sharing this feedback with the team in light of recent Snap tournaments.”

Q: It appears that the Chinese version of Snap has a bunch of different features than everyone else has. Are there plans to incorporate those differences into the global servers?
A: Griffin “We’re watching with a keen eye at how updates and features for Snap in China perform and how they’re received by players. While it’s a great piece of data that can and will help inform how the future of SNAP will look, it’s also a bespoke design with unique challenges for a unique region and we have to evaluate whether or not those ideas work for the global Snap community as a whole.”

Q: Lately it seems that several cards have been releasing very underwhelming out of fear there might be one or two “broken” combos that might get discovered (Elixir not being an Activate card). What heuristics are you all measuring how “broken” a card can potentially be?
A: Glenn “Generally, we prefer to consider “perceived balance” not ‘objective balance.’ At any point in time there’s a best deck, but we balance the metagame to create a collective player experience, not just good spreadsheets. We’ve seen players think metagames were great when one deck was the runaway best deck–Black Bolt/Stature–and players become very frustrated with a deck that wasn’t one our strongest–Arishem. In both cases, we acted to maintain the fun.

Given that, we design using a variety of heuristics. One is giving players the tools they need to react to their perception–if you think Cost reduction is too good, you can play Mobius whether your assessment is right or wrong. Another is the OTA–that’s our promise to players that we’ll update the game and prevent it from becoming stale, regardless of one’s own perception.

Another heuristic we use is to avoid designing towards coin flips on turn 6. This was really Elixir’s problem–it was strong as an activate, but it also distributed that strength in a really repetitive way.

In those cases, we tread more carefully. We want to avoid nerfing cards soon after they release, and those cards are bigger risks and less fun. In the world of Snap Packs, we’ve also got more flexibility to buff cards after release–that was more frustrating to do when the card might take months to return to a Spotlight Cache, but now it’s mostly just as easy to acquire a week or two later.

Those factors combined led us to take a more conservative approach to Elixir–as well as his strongest interaction proving to be with an upcoming card. We did consider an “interim buff’ for Elixir until that card came out, but I decided that would probably turn out more frustrating than satisfying if we had to roll it back. Totally possible I was wrong on that, and I’m reading lots of feedback.”

Questions From You!

Each week, I ask readers of the weekly dev update to leave their questions down in the comment section. That way we can ask those questions on your behalf, or let you know the answers if those questions have been asked before! I read each comment you leave, so I will be adding this section at the end of each week’s edition to highlight your questions that you asked last week!

Q: Does Marvel influence the cards you make?
A: Glenn “We do partner with Marvel to build seasons around upcoming content, which can involve exchanging information to make the season resonate more strongly with fans of both SNAP and the MCU.”

Q: Can you swap character’s abilities to better match their identity, like Wong and Doctor Strange or Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler?
A: Glenn “It’s a relatively easy change for us. But we believe it’s more confusing than it’s worth to players, especially new ones.”

Keep Your Questions and Feedback Coming!

That’s all for this week’s update! Be sure to check back here at Marvel Snap Zone for next week’s update! If you enjoyed the amount of content in this edition, make sure to keep asking your questions to the developers by submitting it in their official Discord in the “#ask-the-team” channel. If you have questions and don’t use Discord, leave your questions for the developers in the comment section here, and I will make sure your question has been answered by the devs!

If you have feedback or changes you would like to see with these weekly updates, also let us know in the comment section!